The Perplexing Life of Erno Rubik

Eleven years after his inspiration, here was the first great tangible reward.
Erno Rubik was moving out of his father's house and renovating one for himself
and his family. But he didn't smile once during the tour he gave me on a grey
morning in Budapest. Maybe any good citizen of the Hungarian People's
Republic, walking through the spacious old stucco building, would have been
disconcerted by the bourgeois touches the workmen were adding: a three-car
garage (with a Mercedes-Benz already parked inside), a glass- enclosed porch
with a pleasant view of the front garden, a remodeled kitchen, an entirely new
upper floor for the two children, an office for Rubik, a sauna and swimming
pool in the basement--not a bad imitation of a villa in the decadent West.
Except for one feature.

''Where's the dining room?'' I asked.

''I eliminated that. We'll eat right there,'' Rubik said, pointing to a
corner of the kitchen.

''Do you plan to have many people over to dinner?''

Rubik puffed on a Marlboro 100, gazed out at the walled yard in back, and
frowned. ''I hope not.''

In Budapest there are two schools of thought about Ru bik. One is that the
Cube has turned him into a taciturn, suspicious, friendless man--and, really,
who could blame him? One moment he's a professor of design who makes $150 a
month and has never been outside the Iron Curtain; the next he's the richest
and most famous man in Hungary, beset by money-grubbing communists and
capitalists alike. The toy he built in his room in his mother's apartment has
perplexed maybe 500 million people. Socialist millionaire, tormentor of
one-eighth of humanity--it would be a strain on anyone.

The other school of thought is that Rubik was a taciturn, suspicious loner
long before he invented the Cube. Maybe one would have to be this sort to
invent the Cube.

Rubik himself, naturally, prefers not to discuss either theory.

Each morning I stopped by his design studio I found him smoking and loking as
if it had been a rough night. His hair was disheveled, his eyes were half
closed, his head slumped. My questions only seemed to make him more
uncomfortable. ''It's very hard to say the truth,'' he admitted. ''Usually we
are saying only part of the truth.'' He didn't mind explaining how he built
and then learned to solve the Cube-- there the truth was easy enough to say.
The real puzzle was what happened afterward.

Any modern marketer could have told him why the Cube would fail.It was put out
by socialist bureaucrats who didn't know how to sell it in the first place,
and who then made a grand mess of things when it became popular anyway. The
Cube's excruciating complexity (it has one correct alignment and 43
quintillion* wrong ones) violated that basic tenet of modern capitalism: no
one ever goes broke underestimating the intelligence of the public. It also
violated the toy industry's standards: it didn't talk, whistle, cry, shoot,
change clothes, appear in a movie, or require batteries.

Yet it became the fastest- selling toy in the world and probablythe most
popular puzzle in history. It amused five-year-olds and inspired
mathematicians. It was blamed for divorces. There were imitations, songs,
and a plastic hammer called the Cube Smasher (''to beat it into 43 quintillion
pieces''). Saturday Night Live did a commercial for Rubik's Grenade (whose
colors had to be aligned in ten seconds or else). At one point, books about
the Cube (there've been more than a hundred, in at least a dozen languages)
simultaneously occupied the Nos. 1, 2, and 4 spots on the New York Times
paperback best-seller lists. Until recently you could find the Cube on
Saturday morning television (on a cartoon show called Rubik the Amazing Cube).
Even today, with the craze over, it's still used in college math classes
dealing with group theory.

And it currently has the title role in a controversial play in Budapest that
uses Rubik's in- vention as a paradigm for the failure of socialist economies
to innovate.

I never could stand the thing myself--I gave up after ten minutes--but if I
had to pick one artifact of this century that will still be produced,
unaltered, 2,000 years from now, I'd bet on the Cube. It's not only a
timeless puzzle, but also a marvelous object to hold. I can't imagine how
anyone could improve the design. The way those 26 little blocks of plastic
are held together is as beautifully clever as the puzzle itself. The ancient
Greeks considered the cube one of the spe- cial Platonic solids because its
sides are identical. (There are only four other regular polyhe- dra, with 4,
8, 12, and 20 sides.) I wonder if some day puzzle makers will refer to
especially elegant creations as Rubikian puzzles.

Of course, there may never be another puzzle like the Cube, which is perhaps
one more reason why Rubik, who's 41 and still designing toys, seems unhappy
these days.

''In its arranged state it suggests calm, peace, a sense of order, security .
. . in sharp contrast to all that the work- ing object means once it is
brought to life, to motion. There is something terrifying in its calm state,
like a wild beast at rest, a tiger in repose, its power lurking.''

--Rubik

This animal was first glimpsed in the spring of 1974. There was no reason it
couldn't have been built centuries earlier, nor was there any reason for Rubik
to stack some blocks of wood and attach them to one another with elastic
strings.

He started twisting one layer of blocks at a time, and soon camethe dramatic
result. The

wild beast--more precisely, the elastic band--snapped.

Why, at the age of 29, was he playing with blocks? Why did he keep playing
with them even after the elastic broke?

Rubik has tried to come up with an answer. He's given hundreds of interviews,
made speeches, even written a 279- page manuscript in English called ''Rubik
on Rubik'' (which he has allowed me to quote). It's unpublished--Rubik says
he hasn't had time to make the revisions requested by his American publisher,
and he has some doubts whether the public really wants to read his
autobiography anyway. (I tried to assure him that such qualms no longer
trouble any celebrity or publisher in America.) Rubik's memoirs aren't unlike
the Cube: highly abstract, often tedious, yet in their own way engaging and
revealing. I had a hard time believing Rubik when he told me he couldn't
think of any colleagues or acquaintances who knew him well. (''It's very, very
hard to find me as a person,'' he warned.) But it seemed more believable after
reading about his unhappy days as an art student (''I was somewhat out of
place among my classmates; I could not be as bohemian as they were''), about
his hobbies (solo kayaking on the Danube, solving chess puzzles), and about
Renni, the stray Irish setter that became ''the best friend I ever had.''

Rubik was born in the air- raid shelter of a Budapest hospital during World
War II. His mother was a published poet, his father a renowned aircraft
engineer who started a company to build gliders. When Ru bik was in college
they divorced. (''The waves surged high but they did not reach me,'' he wrote
of that event.) Rubik describes himself as an above-average, unenthusiastic
pupil all the way through his college classes in sculpture.

After graduating he went back to learn architecture at a small college called
the Academy of Applied Arts and Design. He remained there as a professor,
teaching interior design and generally keeping to himself.

A colleague remembers him as

''a bit sour.''

Many of the early stories about the Cube related that it was built to teach
Rubik's students how to ''deal with three-dimensional objects.'' I never
understood what this meant, much less how the Cube could teach it. The
mystery was cleared up after I arrived in Budapest. At the Academy they
chuckled at the thought of using the Cube in class, and Ru bik dismissed the
idea. Yes, he had shown the Cube to his students, but he hadn't built it for
them. He built it because he was a designer who likes playing with geometric
shapes. His room in his mother's two-bedroom apartment was already filled
with various cardboard and wooden figures the spring day he attached the
elastic strings to the wooden blocks. Although his real interest was the
structural problem--how could the blocks move in- dependently without falling
apart?--he couldn't help noticing the way they rearranged themselves as he
twisted. By the time the elastic broke he was hooked. But he needed
something else to hold the blocks together.

The solution was a brilliantly simple bit of engineering: have the blocks hold
themselves together. Rubik painstakingly cut and sanded the little blocks
(known today as ''cubies''), assembled them, marked each side of the Cube with
adhesive paper of a different color, and started twisting.

''It was wonderful,'' he wrote, ''to see how, after only a few turns, the
colors became mixed, apparently in random fashion. It was tremendously
satisfying to watch this color parade. Like after a nice walk when you have
seen many lovely sights you decide to go home, after a while I decided it was
time to go home, let us put the cubes back in order. And it was at that
moment that I came face to face with the Big Challenge: What is the way
home?''

Half a billion people can imagine--and relish--what hapened next.

He twisted and twisted, and the colors only got more scrambled. It was like
''staring at a piece of writing written in a secret code. But for me, it was
a code I myself had invented! Yet I could not read it. This was such an
extraordinary situation that I simply could not accept it.''

Rubik was in even worse shape than his disciples. He didn't knowif the
problem could be solved. Perhaps there was only one sure way to get back to
the start: by exactly retracing every step he had taken. Rubik couldn't hope
to do that. Randomly twisting the Cube would eventually produce the ordered
state, but he suspected that the laws of probability were against this
occurring in his lifetime. (It has since been calculated that if every person
on earth randomly twisted a Cube once every second, about once every three
centuries one Cube would return to its original state.)

Rubik had only an intuition that there must be a method. He started out by
aligning the eight corner cubies correctly, and he discovered certain
sequences of moves for rearranging just a few cubies at a time. One sequence
of four twists, for instance, would temporarily scramble the cube, exchange
the positions of three cubies, and then restore the rest of the Cube to its
previous state. Other sequences took twelve twists--with chaotic results if he
lost track of what he was doing halfway through. But Rubik persevered in his
room for more than a month and emerged in the summer to show his mother a
pristine Cube.

''I remember how proudly I demonstrated [it] to her when
I found the solution of the problem, and how happy she was in the hope that
from then on I would not work so hard on it.''

The puzzle was so intriguing, Rubik thought, that somebody somewhere must have
already invented it--but then wouldn't he have heard of it? Intriguing
puzzles tend to endure. Today you can still find little plastic versions of
the 15 Puzzle, which was created in the late 1870s and became history's
greatest puzzle craze (until the Cube). It consists of 15 consecutively
numbered, flat squares that can be slid around inside a square frame. Its
creator, Sam Loyd, an American, offered a $1,000 prize to anyone who could
switch the positions of the 14 and 15 without affecting the order of the other
squares. This was impossible to do, as Loyd knew, but soon thousands of
people around the world swore they'd done it--and then stayed up all night
trying to reconstruct how. In some ways it was a two-dimensional version
of the Cube, and Rubik, who played with the 15 Puzzle as a boy, acknowledges
that it may have helped inspire the Cube.

By an odd coincidence, at least two other people were independently inspired
at about the same time. A year after Ru bik had applied for his Hungarian
patent, Terutoshi Ishige, an ironworks owner, applied for a Japanese patent
for a cube held together by the same sort of mechanism (although shaped
slightly differently). An American, Larry Nichols, actually patented his cube
before Ru bik, but it was rejected by all the toy companies he went to
(including Ideal Toy Corporation, which later bought the rights to Rubik's
Cube). Some purists belittle Nichols's model, which was held together with
magnets, and insist that the real genius in Rubik's is in the mechanism
holding it together. In 1984 a federal judge ruled that the distribution of
the Cube in America did infringe Nichols's patent, but made no decision on his
claim for $60 million in damages. The case is being appealed.

Rubik, unaware of any other cube, applied for his patent in January 1975 and
left his invention with a small toymaking cooperative in Budapest. The
patent was finally approved in early 1977. Nine months passed before the
cooperative agreed to begin production, and the first Cubes appeared at the
end of 1977. By this time Rubik was married to a former classmate from the
Academy (''a quiet and stubborn girl,'' he called her; he turned down my
request to see her) and living on the upper two floors of his father's house.
Not long after the Cubes reached the shops, Rubik took his new baby daughter
to a playground in Budapest and saw two of them in action.

''The first belonged (I am sure only temporarily) to an eight-year-old street
urchin, barefooted, shirt torn, covered in bruises, broken and chewed nails,
badly in need of a good wash--a small Oliver Twisting,'' he wrote. ''The
second emerged from the elegant handbag of a still youthful mother in her
thirties who must have just emerged from the beauty salon. She was sitting on
a bench and cast only an occasional glance at her baby in the pram, so
thoroughly was she immersed in the Cube. It was astounding to catch on the
faces of these diametrically opposite people-- the very same expression.''

It would be uplifting to report that the world soon joined the urchin and the
young matron in beating a path to Rubik's door, but that was not to be. The
cube seemed destined for a sedate life within Hungary until Tibor Laczi
arrived. Then the Cube became a capitalist's dream that finally ruined its
socialist manufacturer.

''Do you think, Laczi, that you could sell 30,000 pieces?''

''Rubik, if it were only 30,000, I wouldn't touch it.''

--A meeting of minds in 1978

The way Laczi tells it, he knew the Cube's potential the moment he twisted it
in a Hungarian cafe in November 1978. Laczi, a Hungarian emigre living in
Vienna, had stopped at the small-town cafe while driving to Budapest on a
routine sales trip for an Austrian computer company. His waiter had a Cube
but wasn't sure how it worked. Laczi, a mathematics buff, bought it from him
for about $1.

The next day Laczi visited the state trading company, Konsumex, and asked for
permission to sell the Cube in the West. ''They laughed at me,'' Laczi
recalls. ''They said the Cube was finished. They had ordered 10,000 from the
manufacturer and then canceled half the order. They had already displayed it
at international toy fairs and nobody was interested. I asked them tactfully
how they displayed it. They said it was on a shelf with hundreds of other
toys. Was it taken out of its box? They didn't know. How many people
working at the booth could demonstrate how to solve the puzzle? None of
them--it was not their responsibility.''

Laczi got permission to visit Rubik. ''When Rubik first walked into the room I
felt like giving him some money,'' he says. ''He looked like a beggar. He was
terribly dressed, and he had a cheap Hungarian cigarette hanging out of his
mouth. But I knew I had a genius on my hands. I told him we could sell
millions.''

Rubik taught him how to demonstrate the Cube, which Laczi proceeded to do at
the Nuremberg toy fair several months later. He didn't have a booth--he just
strolled around gathering crowds like a carnival barker, and he intrigued a
well connected British toy expert named Tom Kremer.

Says Laczi, ''Kremer took one of my Cubes and said to me, 'Both of us are now
holding in our hands a wonder of the world.' '' Later that year Kremer helped
arrange the breakthrough: an order for a million Cubes from Ideal Toy.

The puzzle, called the Magic Cube (Buvuos Kocka) in Hungary, was renamed
Rubik's Cube, not to honor Rubik--although it was this change that made him
famous--but to compensate for a troublesome oversight. Neither Rubi nor the
Hungarian manufacturer had bothered to patent the Cube in foreign countries,
and now it was too late to apply. (Many countries require that foreign patent
applications be made within a year of the original application.) Unable to
protect the Cube's design, Ideal Toy wanted at least a name that could be
copyrighted. This meant going West to promote his Cube, and Rubik started in
Vienna with Laczi.

''It was his first trip to the West, and he didn't ask me to take him anywhere
after the press conference,'' Laczi says. ''Most Hungarians that come here
want to look at shops or buy jewelry or visit a bar or a striptease. Rubik
went back to his hotel. He was always that way, even after the money started.
He never liked to be away from his family for long or spend money on himself.
The only thing he did was start smoking better cigarettes. There was no
drinking, no women--he just went back to his hotel room to read. He was
always in another world. I really do like Rubik, but I can't imagine having a
real friendship with him. He doesn't enjoy talking.''

This last trait wasn't especially suited to promotion tours. Glad-handing toy
executives and giving interviews made Rubik miserable. He would try to
explain why the Cube appealed to an innate human fascination with order and
chaos, and all the reporter wanted to know was how long it took him to solve
it (two or three minutes) and whether it was really true that the man reputed
to be the Iron Curtain's first legitimate self-made millionaire still couldn't
get a telephone (it was). Or they would ask, ''What does it feel like to be
famous?'' and Rubik would want to answer ''What does it feel like not to be
famous?''

In 1980 the craze took off, and soon devotees--Cubic Rubes, someone called
them-- formed clubs to study solutions and build ''racing cubes'' by lu
bricating the innards. At the world championship in Budapest in June 1982, a
16-year-old Vietnamese high school student from Los Angeles won by
unscrambling a Cube in 22.95 seconds. Rubik's original method, aligning the
corners first, was one standard approach; another technique was to align the
top layer, then clear up the other sides one at a time. These solutions
required 80 to 120 twists.

Mathematicians vied to find the shortest method of unscrambling,which became
known as God's algorithm. There's speculation that an all-knowing being
could restore any Cube in 22 moves, but the shortest method discovered so far
requires 52. It was found by a British mathematician named Morwen B.
Thistle- waite. With this method the Cube doesn't appear to become steadily
more ordered-- it seems to remain scrambled until the last few moves, when the
colors mysteriously all slide into place. Thistlewaite developed it with the
aid of a computer and the rules of group theory.

Group theory is an area of abstract mathematics, developed in the nineteenth
century, that the Cube transformed into a tangible reality. A group is a
collection of related elements on which certain mathematical operations are
performed. Consider a symmetrical, six-pointed snowflake. Any rotation that
leaves the snowflake in an apparently unchanged position (multiples of 60
degrees) forms a member of the group. The 43 quintillion arrangements of the
Cube can also be thought of as a group: twist any arrangement of the Cube and
you get another element of the group.

For physicists, the Cube has special significance. Solomon Golomb of the
University of Southern California uses it as a model to illustrate the
properties of the elementary particles: a clockwise rotation of a corner cubie
represents a quark; a counterclockwise rotation, an antiquark. The
configuration of the corner cubies leads either to a baryon, consisting of
three quarks, or a meson, a quark-antiquark pair.

By 1982 the craze was over and the toy's Hungarian manufacturer was going
bust--quite a feat when you consider that probably more than 100 million Cubes
were sold worldwide. But that was precisely the problem: a centrally planned
economy isn't accustomed to dealing with consumer crazes. A Budapest writer,
Mezei Andras, has written a book and a play called The Hungarian Cube
chronicling the debacle. It started when the officials at the small
manufacturing cooperative, Politech nika, insisted on trying to expand their
operations to meet the burgeoning demand instead of farming out work to other
factories.

''The company took a loan from the government,'' Andras told me,''but they had
to wait nine or ten months for it to be approved by all the proper com-
mittees. Then it took them six months to order and receive the manufacturing
equipment they needed. By that time the craze was finished, so the company
had a large debt and no popular product, and the state had to save it from
going bankrupt.''

In the meantime, factories in the Far East had been churning outpirated
versions-- which accounted for half of the estimated 100 million sold-- and
Ideal Toy had been forced to turn to other manufacturers for its Cubes. At
one point the Hungarians were so desperate that they bought a million Cubes
from Hong Kong and tried to pass them off as made in Hungary. This proved
especially embarrassing when the shipment was returned because 800,000 Cubes
were defective.

''Everyone made money on the Cube except the Hungarians,'' Andras said, ''but
it was still a good lesson for us. It has taught people that our way of
centrally directing the economy has to change. We can be socialists and still
have a market-oriented economy.''

Today Hungary has a growing number of private businesses and the freest economy
in the Eastern bloc (''goulash communism,'' the commentators call it)--not
directly because of the Cube, of course, but Rubik has certainly become the
country's equivalent of a Horatio Alger hero. I heard plenty of sniping in
Budapest against the local nouveau riche (such as black marketeers or
operators of the newly fashionable hamburger stands), but I didn't hear anyone
begrudge Rubik his fortune. People seemed proud of him and said he deserved
his share of the Cube's proceeds, which was reported to be about five per
cent. I was told by knowledgeable sources that he has made $3 million or $4
million, more than anyone else in Hungary has earned (legally, that is), and
enough to send lots of Hungarian inventors in the direction of Tibor Laczi.

''I get several letters from them a day,'' says Laczi, who livesin a lavish
house in Vienna, wears a diamond ring, and markets inventions full time. ''I
think the Eastern bloc has many more inventors than the West. In the West
people have to work, but in the East they get their salary no matter what, so
they can sit in their offices and think all day. Everybody has connections,
so they can always get a sample made for free somewhere. They all want to be
like Rubik, and today it is easier for them. There are more export firms now,
and the officials are better. If anyone puts up an obstacle, the inventor can
make a loud complaint, 'Let's remember Rubik's Cube.' ''

Of course, certain philosophical East-West differences remain. Laczi tells of
going to the premiere of The Hungarian Cube. ''At the end of the play they
introduced me and brought me on stage next to the actor who plays me.
Afterwards a crowd of people came to me nd asked for my autograph and thanked
me for all that I done for the Hungarian state. I said to them, 'But I didn't
do it for the state. I did it for myself.' ''

''What does a socialist millionaire do with his money?''

When this question was put to Rubik several years ago by Life and Literature,
an intellectual weekly in Budapest, he devoted a good deal of time-- most of
the interview, in fact-- to not answering it. It wasn't just the ideological
issue that bothered him (although he did insist that successes like his
wouldn't ''corrupt socialist ethics'' or lead to ''lavish spending''). He
sounded genuinely troubled by the money and what came with it: ''For me it is
another quiz, a new puzzle, and it is not so easy to find the proper
solution,'' he said, and lamented, ''Success has taken away from me the time
necessary for looking inside, together with silence and peace.''

In our meetings last fall he seemed as worried as ever. ''Mistrustful'' was
the word his acquaintances kept using. ''He's afraid that people will take
advantage of him,'' said Laczi. ''You know, in this play about the Cube, the
rest of us all gave permission to use our real names. But Rubik wanted his
changed. He suggested they name the inventor Bubik. He was finally convinced
it would sound silly, and his name was used. But it tells you something.''

Rubik, who obviously does not need to work--$3 million goes a long way in
Budapest-- told me he would return to his teaching job when his present
one-year sabbatical ends. ''I want to try to keep my life the same,'' Rubik
said, although he seems reconciled to a few changes. He now has a telephone
in his apartment (but doesn't know when he'll get one for his house). After
years of urging from Laczi, he has moved up from his dilapidated Polski Fiat
to the Mercedes and a Volkswagen Golf (the same cars that Laczi has). His
clothing is slightly upgraded but no more formal--turtleneck, corduroys,
high-top white sneakers.

He has donated $200,000 to endow a foundation to help promising inventors in
Hungary. He has also provided most of the money to establish a private
cooperative, the Rubik Studio, which employs a dozen people and is planning to
design such items as furniture and toys. Since the Cube, Ru bik has produced
several other toys--the most successful was Rubik's Snake, which could be
twisted into shapes--and he told me that some day he wants to try his hand at
designing computer games. He also spoke vaguely of attempting to develop a
''general theory of structures.''

He's readying a new toy for release sometime this year. It's a bit like a
jigsaw puzzle, I heard elsewhere, but Rubik doesn't want to talk about the toy
or its prospects.

''People always ask me if I will surpass the Cube,'' he says. ''What can I
answer? I did not plan to make the Cube. I did not plan the success. I
wanted nothing else than to make the object as perfect as possible. Now,
after the Cube, I still don't have any plans to make anything like it. I'm
still the same person, thinking the same way, so it's possible I will invent
something. But to want to repeat the Cube--that is not the way to live.''

Rubik sometimes mentions the Golden Age of the Cube, by which hemeans the time
before the craze, back when ''it brought only delights to me.'' He has a lot
of--well, interesting--explanations for those delights. He discusses the
way the Cube can seem alive as it heats up in your hand, and the fact that
each face of the Cube is made of three layers of three blocks. ''For me, the
number three seems to have a particular significance, relevant in some strange
ways to the relation between man and nature. Take mother-child-father, heav-
en-earth-hell, creation-preservation-destruction, birth-life-death.''
Sometimes he talks about the Cube as an imitation of life itself--or even as
an improvement on life.

''The problems of puzzles are very near the problems of life,'' he said at his
studio one morning. ''Our whole life is solving puzzles. If you are hungry,
you have to find something to eat. But everyday problems are very mixed--
they're not clear. A good puzzle, it's a fair thing. Nobody is lying. It's
very clear, and the problem depends just on you. You can solve it
independently. But to find happiness in life, you're not independent. That's
the big difference.''

I took out some toothpicks to show Rubik another kind of puzzle. It was from
a book by Martin Gardner called aha! Insight. Gardner, a great American
puzzle expert (and DISCOVER contributor), had collected problems requiring a
sudden inspiration--a refreshing alternative to the Cube, I thought. (Gardner,
incidentally, never had the patience for the Cube either.) ''Tell me what you
think of this,'' I said. ''How do you move two toothpicks and leave exactly
four unit squares?''

''Move just two,'' Rubik repeated to himself, sitting up in his chair. He
tried removing two from the table, which wasn't allowed--they had to stay in
the diagram. Then he produced this formation, which was clever, but the four
squares had to be the same size. He wanted to know if he could double up some
of the toothpicks--also illegal, but I did admire the effort. This was the
first sign of life I'd seen in three days. He nibbled at his fingernails and
played with the tooth- picks for five intense minutes.

''There is a trick,'' he said, exasperated.

But after another couple of minutes he relaxed. He showed me theanswer:

''It's a nice puzzle,'' he said.

''This is called the aha! instinct. It's one quick--''

''A flash,'' he said.

''Yes,'' I replied. ''It's very different from the Cube that way.''

''Yes, but with the Cube there are many flashes, there are many aha's.''

I told him that the problem

I had with the Cube was that it took so much grunt work to remember all of the
required ma- neuvers.

But Rubik wasn't listening. He was already rearranging the toothpicks to
show one of his favorite puzzles. Then he grabbed Gardner's book and turned
to its next puzzle, which is to rearrange the toothpicks below to form six
unit squares:

''Make six unit squares,'' he muttered. ''Make six . . . they must all be the
same size?''

''Yes,'' I said, devoutly hoping to see him squirm here--a smallrevenge I
could extract on behalf of the millions of Cube dropouts. I'd always had a
theory that we were the intelligent ones. As Rubik stared at the toothpicks
and muttered, it pleased me to reflect that I had solved this problem in only
about ten minutes. What pleased me even more was my conviction that this
particular aha!, this nimble leap of intellect, was beyond the reach of any
mind that would slog through the Cube.

But he got it in less than a minute. Rubik suddenly realized that he could
use the toothpicks to form squares in a three-dimensional structure.

''Ah, it's the Cube,'' he said, smiling and nodding to himself as he
contemplated the tooth- picks in his hands. He looked very much alone, and
very happy.